There isn't a radical authoritarian fringe in the US. There are multiple, competing radical authoritarian perspectives in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the sum of them constituted a majority.
They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.
I certainly agree about the lack of shame - but even if you destroyed all of the Flock cameras (and any other public traffic cams) you're still left with no actual protection for your private data.
There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.
The point is to undermine data protection; this debate is useless. It's a question about power and control, not a technical one. The people lobbying for this don't care about children, and neither are they getting big support from a constituency clamoring for this. This is an intelligence initiative, and a donor initiative from people who are in a position to control the platform (all computing and communications) after it is locked down.
It's not even worth talking about online. There's too much inorganic support for the objectives of nation-states and the corporations that own them.
Legislation has been advanced in Colorado demanding that all OSes verify the user's age. It will fail, but it will be repeated 100 times, in different places, smuggled attached to different legislation, the process and PR strategies refined and experimented with, versions of it passed in Australia, South Korea, maybe the UK and Europe, and eventually passed here. That means that "general purpose" computing will be eventually be lost to locked bootloaders.
And it will be an entirely engineered and conscious process by people who have names. And we will babble about it endlessly online, pretending that we have some control over it, pretending that this is a technical discussion or a moral discussion, on platforms that they control, that they allow us to babble on as an escape valve. Then, one day the switch will flip, and advocacy of open bootloaders, or trading in computers that can install unattested OSes, will be treated as organized crime.
All I can beg you to do is imagine how ashamed you'll be in the future when you're lying about having supported this now, or complaining that you shouldn't have "trusted them to do it the right way." Don't let dumb fairytales about Russians, Chinese, Cambridge Analytics and pedophile pornography epidemics have you fighting for your own domination. Maybe you'll be the piece of straw that slows things down just enough that current Western oligarchies collapse before they can finish. Maybe we'll get lucky.
Polls and ballots show that none of this stuff has majority organic support. But polls can be manipulated, and good polls have to be publicized for people to know they're not alone, and not afraid they're misunderstanding something. If both candidates on the ballot are subverted, the question never ends up on the ballot.
The article itself says nothing that hasn't been said before, and stays firmly under the premise that access to content online by under-18s is suddenly one of the most critical problems of our age, rather than a sad annoyance. What is gained by having this dumb discussion again?
> What are some links to HN comments that you (or anyone else) feel is "coordinated astroturfing"?
I don't think that there is any definitive way to prevent or detect this anymore. The number of personnel dedicated to online manipulation has grown too much, and the technology has advanced too far.
These are now discussions that states and oligarchs have interests in, not Juicero or smart skillet astroturfing. And this remains a forum that people use to indicate elite support for their arguments.
They are the only supporters of majority Shiite populations who live under western-supported Sunni and Wahabi dictators. They are a Shiite theocracy surrounded by hostile Western-supported Sunni theocracies.
> Every single westerner pays more for things because of the instability Iran funds.
This is simply a lie. Every single Westerner pays vastly more for things because they spend trillions propping up illegitimate middle eastern dictators in order to keep their natural resources cheap and accessible for sleazy western middlemen to mark up.
You don't know that the current, US supported leader of Syria is an Islamic fundamentalist Al Qaeda terrorist who it previously had a massive bounty on the death of?
Turns out, however, that he really enjoys money. And that the US has a lot of it.
> Islamists and communists. Guess which one was helped by USA? :-)
Neither was helped by the USA. The Shah was helped by the USA.
What the USA did is the same thing it does in all of the Islamic dictatorships that it props up - it used its intelligence and its cash to help its dictator exterminate all of his secular opposition. Actually kill. What was left was religious fundamentalist opposition that it couldn't touch, and that the Shah himself partially relied on to stay in power. That meant that when the general population was finally at the point of exasperation, the only institutions that were 1) prepared to be the vehicle of that exasperation and 2) had an government in waiting that could take charge after the government had fallen were the religious ones.
Same thing that happened in Egypt after decades of helping Mubarak kill members of the secular opposition and destroy their organizations. When the government was overthrown spontaneously by a public driven to their limit, the only people prepared to take over, and supported by the public, were fundamentalists. The US saw another Iran coming and quickly stepped in to destroy the popular will and install another dictator that they could control.
There's some truth to what you're saying, but it's a huge exaggeration. It's absolutely incorrect to say that the US helped the Shah kill all of his secular political opponents. It's generally true that SAVAK had neutered the communist opposition, but there were many secular opponents of the Shah who contributed to the Iranian Revolution. Many of them had been imprisoned at various points, but not killed. Take Shapour Bakhtiar or Mehdi Bazargan for example. There were many, many secular people or moderate Islamists who opposed the Shah during the Iranian Revolution.
What happened is that Khomeini consolidated power after the revolution and eliminated these people.
> So you want you elected leaders to save Palestinians
I don't want that. I want them to stop paying Israelis with our money to kill Palestinians. If they want to do atrocities, they can do it on their own dime.
When talking about Israel, it's always couched in terms of universal human rights. When confronted with their lack of advocacy for the human rights of practically anyone else, their cognitive fallback is that they only care for what they feel the U.S. government is responsible for, and that it's not really about universal human rights, and never was. Then, when no one is paying attention anymore, they swing back to being avowed universal human rights activists who just happen to be condemning Israel.
It's not, really, if you are now ignoring all of the dictatorial theocracies that we support enthusiastically, and focusing on the ones that America is looking for an excuse to intervene in.
And this is not a "why focus on this thing when there are other things" fake argument. These protests were engineered by people with the intention of intervening, and a lot of that engineering the involved manipulation of western media narratives and the creation of fake organizations to become sources of information. It's not coincidence or luck that you're focused on Iran; people were sitting around planning an invasion of Iran and part of their planning was "How can we get the public to focus on Iran enough to give Congress cover to ignore another Executive war?"
The actual narrative, undisputed by even the people involved, is that
1) a currency crash was intentionally instigated in Iran by the West, which caused protests. We have bragged about this.
2) Many of the educated Iranian middle class joined these protests to argue against the regime in general, which they always do.
3) US and Israeli-supported terrorist organizations took advantage of those protests (like a black bloc) to start burning down buildings and burning cops alive, armed by the west and networked through smuggled Skylink terminals,
4) the US and Israel bragged that the protests were materially supported by covert western intelligence in order to push the crackdown to atrocity levels, and to eliminate even the general public's support for the protests (which would be some restraint to the government.) They literally said that many of the protesters were Mossad agents. You might as well be saying "please kill them." It's as if Al Qaeda announced that they were materially supporting and completely infiltrating BLM protests, and when many BLM activists were arrested, they were carrying Al Qaeda satellite terminals and arms smuggled from Pakistan.
(The Iranian middle class was even out, because they aren't traitors, they just don't want to live in a theocracy. The West are who turned Iran into a dictatorship by replacing Mossadegh with the Shah. The West helped Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran. We care nothing about Iranians, we just want to steal from them. We're thieves, and we're consciously moving to a economic strategy of piracy in order to take advantage of our navy.)
5) The US moved as much navy to bear on Iran as it did when it invaded Iraq, and said that unless some magic words were said that nobody knows, it would invade.
You might be comfortable being manipulated like this, but I am not.
The case for intervention in Iran is much stronger, from the perspective of the United States, if you zoom out and realize that a larger fight in the Pacific is brewing and it would be wise to remove a player from the board who would happily provide access to fuel and refining capacity to PRC. Not saying I agree with this, necessarily, but it helps to steel man the more sophisticated cases when you are trying to understand complex geopolitical events.
To the extent that the protests are being "engineered", certainly there are elements of that, but why wouldn't there be and why would that be bad a priori? The regime is uniquely terrible in the world, and if you listen to Iranian ex-pats who fled it seems clear a lot of the kids that supported the revolution in 1979 quickly realized that it was a mistake, and that they underestimated the extent to which the new regime would prioritize regressive islamism over actually addressing what were at the time legitimate economic inequality issues.
>it would be wise to remove a player from the board who would happily provide access to fuel and refining capacity to PRC.
Washington has an easier way to do that: namely, to use its navy and the Sentinel Islands (controlled by Washington ally India) to prevent the transit of tankers from Iran to China.
Yes, possibly, but running an indefinite blockade or interdiction operation is still costly. It is lower in complexity in terms of operational capabilities required than a decapitation strike against the potential co-belligerent, although this is rapidly changing, but in order to effectively run one you are dedicating a very sizable percentage of your overall combat power away from the front. Additionally, I am skeptical that the Indian Navy could handle such an operation independently. Their fleet size has grown over the last decade, but, as alluded to, interdiction operations are increasingly complex so they would likely need assistance at least at the beginning. It's also, I think, a stretch to call India an "ally" per se of Washington today (maybe "partner" would be more accurate), and I find it hard to believe that India would effectively enter into a world war on behalf of the United States.
There is an argument to be made that a maritime interdiction operation is a better approach, and the information I would need to decide definitively which approach I think is better is likely very classified.
Not when people make arguments based on dreams, hope, and optimism.
If somebody tells me that we can build a shed, I want them to talk about wood, nails and concrete, or to stop talking.
reply